जाग उठो भगवान

'Jaag Utho Bhagwan' is one of the six songs of Lakharani (1945), written by Qamar Jalalabadi and composed by Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar for the Prabhat Film Company. Hindi Film Geet Kosh records the song and its disc number but names no singer, and no recording of it has been traced online, so this entry documents what is verifiable and nothing more. What is known is its place: a direct address to God in a film whose plot turns on a community of devotees being kept out of the temple, and which ends with God appearing on earth to settle the matter.

No copy of the recording has been traced, so nothing can honestly be said about how it sounds. What can be said is what the composer brought to it: Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar was a Hindustani classical vocalist and a Marathi Sangeet Natak composer, a man credited with creating new raags, and his film songs stayed inside that idiom rather than following the folk-and-rhythm direction Hindi film music took in the mid-1940s.

The title is an imperative addressed upward — a call to God to wake, which in the bhakti tradition is both a devotional convention (the prabhati or morning song that rouses the deity) and, in a reform film, an accusation with a sharp edge: the god is asleep while his devotees are kept standing outside his house. Since the recording has not been traced, the text beyond the title line is not available to describe, and nothing further is asserted here.

Lakharani was written and directed by Vishram Bedekar for Prabhat, Poona, and released in 1945. Bichwa (Durga Khote) is queen of a devout community treated as untouchable and barred from every temple; her daughter Lakharani marries the prince of an atheist community and is excommunicated; famine tests the believers' faith, conflict breaks out between the two groups, and God finally materialises on earth, after which the ban on temple entry is lifted. The film is also the acting debut of Guru Dutt, who played the heroine's brother and assisted Bedekar in the direction.

Lakharani flopped and its prints were lost; its records went out of circulation so completely that for over seventy years none of the six songs could be heard at all. A few have since resurfaced through private collectors and Saregama's catalogue uploads. This one has not. It survives as a title and a disc number in Hindi Film Geet Kosh, which is the whole of what can currently be said about it.